It is recognised in the health care industry that in order to service patient population, health care providers, by necessity, have become participants in many networks. This requires the complex management of many fee schedules, rule sets, and service code definitions, a process that is commonly outside of the capabilities of most practice management systems. The process is then left up to the carrier adjudicating the insurance claims, creating further inefficiencies and added costs to health plans. Further, it is recognised that there are many industry efforts in place to reduce cost, as well as constant Federal and State legislative changes, electronic transaction code sets, and privacy and security requirements. Therefore, health claims processing has become a costly and time consuming endeavour in the current health care industry.
For example, the current healthcare claims system is the source where inefficiencies contribute in administrative overhead and delays. Furthermore, providers are suffering from bad debt expenses on patient payment amounts. In addition the current medical claims system is fraught with the high potential for errors and omissions resulting in more cost to process claims. Providers realise that the reduction of their Account Receivables balance and reconciliation time is desirable. This reduction can happen through more direct eligibility verification, streamlined management of many network relationships, and faster payment. For payers, a key to more efficient plan management is increasing their membership. This membership increase can happen through a value proposition which includes increasing auto-adjudication rates by reducing rejected claims and eliminating many of the steps required in order to accomplish today's claims administration. There is a need for the implementation of a rules based adjudication engine flexible enough to implement new plans/benefits and associated adjudication modules more rapidly and at lower costs than current static adjudication systems.